Monday, September 01, 2008

Lets get something straight first. VoIP in the business environment is very viable and has made great strides in that market niche. For businesses looking for VoIP telephony (broadband phone) alternatives I suggest perusing these 2 resources:

Whichever country you're in, I suspect the main answer to this is that incumbent telcos see consumer VoIP as a very big threat to their business (with good reason)

However, another good reason is due to the inherent potential for poor call quality, problems with echo and it's intolerance towards any significant delay in transmission. The fact that it's still an emerging technology means that people who depend on their telephone services working 100% reliably 99.999% of the time are going to be very quick to rule out VoIP, especially in a non-mobile environment. It's worth remembering that most mobile services nowadays are *very* closely related to VoIP - and just about everyone has had a laugh at someone doing the "mobile dance" as their signal breaks up and try to get themselves into a better location for reception.

I've been playing with VoIP for a couple of years now and while the technology is looking good, there are a lot of things that *must* be taken into consideration - again, look at the problems encountered on a mobile phone network which is a *very* controlled voice over data network. VoIP will certainly play a big part of the telecommunications market in years to come, but it will be a slow and gradual move.